Tag Archives: Discipleship

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Walking With Christ—Where Are You Going In 2012?

Discipleship is a relational journey—a daily walk with Jesus empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit—taking us more deeply into a love relationship with the Heavenly Father, a more compassionate love for our fellow man, and increasing likeness, in sum and substance, to the Son, Jesus Christ.

It is also an intentional and strategic activity on our part.  There are certain things that disciples actively do to grow—it doesn’t just happen passively. And nothing is more vital to a growing discipleship than reading and reflecting on the Word of God in a deliberate and consistent way.

I hope you have a plan for that in 2012.  I do…as does the fellowship where I serve as pastor.  I want to invite you to adopt the plan that I will use this year, and join me in this exciting journey of growth.

The plan calls for weekly, intentional and strategic engagement in the Bible…and it is two-fold.  It calls for reading key passages and memorizing key verses.  Here is how it will unfold:

The Essential 100

The Essential 100 Challenge (E100) helps you get an overview of the Bible… without getting bogged down. The Plan guides you through 50 Old Testament passages and 50 New Testament passages — The Essential 100 — so you can see the big picture of God’s Word, and form a daily Bible reading habit in the process. Below is the link to this creative plan:

http://www.pcctoday.com/life-learning/bible-reading-plan/

You can take the challenge and read these passages during the first hundred days of 2012.  Or you can slow it down a bit and work through these 100 passages at a pace of two per week, enabling you to complete this challenge in one year. That’s what I plan to do.  And if you like, you can link your reading to this blog, which will follow the plan throughout 2012.  Two blogs will appear each week, one on Wednesday and one on Friday, as I work my way through the Essential 100.

Project 52

Project 52 will help you to hide one key verse from God’s living and active Word in your heart each week during 2012.  Imagine that … 52 verses committed to memory this year!  Sounds like an elephant-sized task; but as the old saying goes, you can eat an elephant—one bite at a time.

Join me in committing these verses to memory.  And to get them rooted deeply in our hearts, I will write a devotional blog each Monday on the selected verse for that week. I am looking forward to this project—and to doing it in partnership with you!

You can find the verses we will be memorizing in the same location as the reading plan:

http://www.pcctoday.com/life-learning/bible-reading-plan/

You can also grab a Memory Verse Desktop Wallpaper each week for your computer to help you meditate each day on the scheduled verse. Check here to see our first screensaver verse: http://www.pcctoday.com/_img/wp/Desk_1024_768.jpg

I am stoked about my walk with Jesus in 2012.  With the ever-present help of the Holy Spirit and a few intentional practices on my part, I plan on looking a little (hopefully a lot) more like Jesus by the end of next year.

Happy New Year!  May God perfect everything that concerns you in 2012.

Ray

Posted on

Walking With Christ—Where Are You Going In 2012?

Discipleship is a relational journey—a daily walk with Jesus empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit—taking us more deeply into a love relationship with the Heavenly Father, a more compassionate love for our fellow man, and increasing likeness, in sum and substance, to the Son, Jesus Christ.

It is also an intentional and strategic activity on our part.  There are certain things that disciples actively do to grow—it doesn’t just happen passively. And nothing is more vital to a growing discipleship than reading and reflecting on the Word of God in a deliberate and consistent way.

I hope you have a plan for that in 2012.  I do…as does the fellowship where I serve as pastor.  I want to invite you to adopt the plan that I will use this year, and join me in this exciting journey of growth.

The plan calls for weekly, intentional and strategic engagement in the Bible…and it is two-fold.  It calls for reading key passages and memorizing key verses.  Here is how it will unfold:

The Essential 100

The Essential 100 Challenge (E100) helps you get an overview of the Bible… without getting bogged down. The Plan guides you through 50 Old Testament passages and 50 New Testament passages — The Essential 100 — so you can see the big picture of God’s Word, and form a daily Bible reading habit in the process. Below is the link to this creative plan:

http://www.pcctoday.com/life-learning/bible-reading-plan/

You can take the challenge and read these passages during the first hundred days of 2012.  Or you can slow it down a bit and work through these 100 passages at a pace of two per week, enabling you to complete this challenge in one year. That’s what I plan to do.  And if you like, you can link your reading to this blog, which will follow the plan throughout 2012.  Two blogs will appear each week, one on Wednesday and one on Friday, as I work my way through the Essential 100.

Project 52

Project 52 will help you to hide one key verse from God’s living and active Word in your heart each week during 2012.  Imagine that … 52 verses committed to memory this year!  Sounds like an elephant-sized task; but as the old saying goes, you can eat an elephant—one bite at a time.

Join me in committing these verses to memory.  And to get them rooted deeply in our hearts, I will write a devotional blog each Monday on the selected verse for that week. I am looking forward to this project—and to doing it in partnership with you!

You can find the verses we will be memorizing in the same location as the reading plan:

http://www.pcctoday.com/life-learning/bible-reading-plan/

You can also grab a Memory Verse Desktop Wallpaper each week for your computer to help you meditate each day on the scheduled verse. Check here to see our first screensaver verse: http://www.pcctoday.com/_img/wp/Desk_1024_768.jpg

I am stoked about my walk with Jesus in 2012.  With the ever-present help of the Holy Spirit and a few intentional practices on my part, I plan on looking a little (hopefully a lot) more like Jesus by the end of next year.

Happy New Year!  May God perfect everything that concerns you in 2012.

Ray

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Best Blogs: A Few Good Men (and Women)

A Few Good Men (And Women)

“Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘If anyone would come
after me, he must deny himself and take
up his cross and follow me.’”
~Matthew 16:24

Soul Snacks: Does Christ’s call to discipleship seem a little extreme in comparison to the “easy believism” that passes for discipleship today? You will likely hear a lot more about a life of comfort, security and success these days from spiritual leaders than straight talk on self-denial and cross bearing.

Jesus made no of promises of an easy, breezy, carefree Christianity. Rather, he demanded complete obedience, costly sacrifice, and selfless servanthood from those who would follow him. He told them that they would have to eat his flesh and drink his blood if they wanted a part in him. He said people would hate them, misunderstand them, reject them, persecute them, and put them out of the synagogues. And he even promised that people would kill them, believing that in so doing they were helping God out.

Yet the eleven disciples (one of them, Judas, got cold feet) fully bought into Christ’s call to costly discipleship. They left everything they had and everything they knew for a life that promised nothing except a chance to advance God’s kingdom in a resistant, hostile world. They fully understood that the overwhelming bulk of their rewards would come only afterwards, in the afterlife.

And, despite Christ’s less than appealing recruitment campaign, these first disciples, followed in the years to come by countless thousands of other hungry seekers, flocked to this self-denying, cross-bearing brand of Christianity. Jesus was a tough act to follow, to say the least, but these disciples eagerly signed up—and they changed the world.

How? Simply by doing what Jesus had asked: They denied themselves, took up their crosses, and laid down their lives for his sake. Without a political voice, financial resources, social standing, and military might, this unlikely ragtag band of followers conquered the Roman Empire in less than three hundred years.

Such was the radical power of this brand of fully committed discipleship.

Do you worry, as I do, that Christ’s call to costly discipleship would empty most churches of its people in our day. Though most believers give mental assent to cross-bearing and self-denial, in reality there is very little evidence of it in their lives, or in their churches.

If Jesus rebuked Peter (Matthew 16:23) — “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men” — for suggesting Christianity without a cross (Matthew 16:24), what do you suppose he would say to us who have suggested Christian discipleship without cross-bearing?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once remarked, “Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.” We need to remind ourselves of that truth, because you likely won’t hear it from too many pulpits today. A.W. Tozer commented that “it has become popular to preach a painless Christianity and automatic saintliness. It has become part of our ‘instant’ culture. ‘Just pour a little water on it, stir mildly, pick up a gospel tract, and you are on your Christian way.’”

We must aggressively and boldly reject that brand of faith, because that is not the discipleship to which Jesus has called us. And that is not the discipleship that I want for my life.

How about you?

P.S. “Salvation is free … but discipleship will cost you your life.” ~Dietrich Bonhoeffer